Social media is an awesome way to build brand awareness and to generate free traffic to your website. A properly maintained social media profile can bring in new customers, keep existing customers in the loop about new products or services that your business is offering, and draw a lot of hype around your brand.
All of this is possible with a properly curated social media profile. However, too many businesses waste time and money on social media campaigns that end up getting them nowhere. To find out how to avoid that pitfall, use the following strategies when you’re planning a social media campaign for your own business.
Decide Which Social Media Platform to Use
It can be tempting to look at all of the social media platforms and decide that you want a profile on each one. This is rarely a good choice. Maintaining a social media profile takes a lot of time and energy, and it’s better to do an outstanding job with just one or two profiles, versus doing an OK job with five. To start off, here is an overview of the amount of users on seven popular platforms.
Facebook – 1.4 billion users
QZone (A Chinese social media platform) – 629 million users
LinkedIn – 347 million users
Google + – 300 million users
Instagram – 300 million users
Twitter – 288 million users
Tumbler – 230 million users
Facebook is by far the most popular platform, with 1.4 billion active users. Apart from QZone, all the other platforms are in about the same ballpark for the number of active users. Although you should watch out for Instagram, as it’s consistently growing its user base.
When picking a social media platform for your business, you want to find out which platform your customers are using, and then build up a profile on that platform. Facebook is always always a great place to start because you’re probably already aware of how it works, and creating a business page is easy.
If you’re a local business then you’ll definitely want to create a Google + page. You can link this page to your business on Google Maps, which will make it easy for people to find out more about your business, working hours, and to also read reviews. Once you’ve figured out what your ideal platforms are, it’s time to write down your goals.
Figure Out Your Goals
Depending on where you are in your social media journey, you’ll end up having different goals for your profile. Here are four types of goals that address the different stages of the social media journey.
- Operational – This is the stage when you first open an account. It’s where you learn how to use the platform, what works and what doesn’t, and it’s also when you begin to grow your user base.
- Key Performance Indicators – By now you have consistent traffic coming to your page. You’ve made some mistakes and learned from them. You’re working to continue growing your user base and the number of daily hits to your page.
- Stretch – These goals are difficult to achieve, but attainable with the proper effort and a bit of luck. If your business is at this stage with its social media presence, you’ll be setting goals like “Increase traffic by 10% to our landing page” or “Get 500 Retweets of our latest promotion”.
- Dream – Dream goals are unrealistic in the short term, but they’re something to reach towards in the long term. They might include breaking 10,000 followers, having a social media campaign get mentioned in the press, or get mentioned by a famous blogger or YouTube personality. It helps to define these goals because even though they might seem lofty, they give you something to consistently reach towards as you grow your presence online.
Begin to Work on Your Tasks
After defining your goals it’s time to take real action towards achieving them. That’s where tasks come in. They’re an easy way to approach every social media campaign so that you have a crystal clear idea of where you’re headed, and what actions you need to take every day to get there. Tasks can be broken up into four parts.
1. Listen
2. Think / Plan
3. Do
4. Review
First, you need to listen to your customers. Figure out which platforms they’re using, what types of content they like, and which posts from your competitors get the most likes, Retweets, or pins. Remember, your company’s social media page isn’t a place for you to post content that you find the most interesting. You have to take into account what your target audience will like as well.
Second, think about your strategy and create a plan. In fact, you might want to create several plans. A yearly plan, then a monthly and even weekly plan. You should plan out what content you want to post at least a month in advance. Posting shouldn’t be random and sporadic, it should be consistent and focused.
Third, post content regularly. Regardless of which social media platform you use, you should be posting at least once a week. However, many businesses have found out that posting more can offer even better results. We’ll talk more about this in the second article, coming next week.
Fourth, look back at what you’ve posted and take notes about what has worked, and what hasn’t. Look at views, likes, retweets, and so on. All of this data is measurable and you should be taking advantage of that. By reviewing your content you’ll be able to plan better for the future, growing your user base and your presence online.
For even more tips about how to create the best social media campaign, come back next week to read the second part of this article. To learn more about optimizing your company’s website, or creating a new one from scratch, contact Superiocity today. We’re your local experts when it comes to web design!